Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the business and IT landscape. And now, it has become integral to organizations’ efforts to drive efficiency and improve productivity.

In fact, according to the recent Dynatrace survey, “The state of AI 2024,” the majority of technology leaders (83%) say AI has become mandatory. However, most organizations are still in relatively uncharted territory with their AI adoption strategies. Alongside the numerous benefits, these organizations need to manage the increased risks the technology brings.

Looking into the future of AI in 2024, the report explores these challenges and highlights how technology leaders can overcome them to drive fast, precise, and trustworthy answers and automation.

AI investment is accelerating

The report indicates that organizations are already recognizing the vast potential of AI. Their plans to increase investment in these technologies over the next 12 months show no signs of slowing. For example, nearly two-thirds (61%) of technology leaders say they will increase investment in AI over the next 12 months to speed software development.

As they continue on this path, organizations expect other benefits, from enabling business users to easily customize dashboards (54%) to building interactive queries for analytics (48%). This means AI will affect not only IT and back-office support functions but also front-line staff in customer-facing roles.

AI is essential to taming multicloud complexity

One area where organizations see significant potential for AI is in helping to reduce the complexity of their modern cloud environments. Eighty-seven percent of technology leaders say AI-powered issue prevention and remediation are critical to managing multicloud complexity.

Organizations will increase AI investment over the next 12 months to tackle this complexity by delivering predictable, trustworthy, and precise answers in real time. For example, 73% of technology leaders are investing in AI to generate insight from observability, security, and business events data.

This means greater productivity for individual teams. DevOps teams, for example, can focus on driving innovation instead of grinding through manual jobs. According to “The state of AI” report, nearly three-quarters of IT operations, development, and security teams plan to use AI to become more proactive in executing their work.

Technology leaders also expect AI to become critical to the success of core DevOps use cases, including the following:

• threat detection, investigation, and response (82%);
• automating complex operations tasks (63%); and
• eliminating false alerts and the manual effort of validating code deployments (58%).

Minimizing AI risk is an urgent priority

Alongside the clear advantages of AI, the report indicates that there are challenges for AI adoption. In the wake of a significant hype cycle following the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot based on generative AI, most technology leaders are concerned that generative AI could be susceptible to unintentional bias, error, and misinformation.

To address this, DevOps teams need to find ways to easily engineer AI prompts that contain detailed context and precision. In doing so, they can achieve meaningful, AI-generated responses that users can trust and avoid inaccurate or inconsistent statements.

But it’s not just the accuracy of AI-generated answers that’s a concern. Organizations must also be mindful of the potential security and compliance risks.

The report indicates that 95% of technology leaders are concerned that using generative AI to create code could result in data leakage as well as improper or illegal use of intellectual property.

Organizations need sufficient guardrails to manage the data that AI models ingest. Otherwise, employees could accidentally expose sensitive information. This need will drive demand for AI platforms that are purpose-built with security and privacy requirements in mind.

AI will have a widespread impact

Delving beyond the impact on IT, the report shows that AI is set to improve workforce satisfaction throughout the organization. Nontechnical workers can make informed, data-driven decisions with easier access to analytics through natural language queries and virtual assistants.

As a result, the burden on DevOps teams will ease, as the pressure to deliver on the business’ needs for data-driven insights will no longer depend solely on DevOps.

To realize these benefits, organizations must get their AI strategy right. Technology leaders can lay the groundwork for success by recognizing that not all AI is created equal. More complex use cases, such as writing software code and resolving security vulnerabilities, require a combination of AI types and different data sources, such as observability, security, and business events.

The report identifies this “composite AI” approach — where the precision of causal AI meets the forecasting capabilities of predictive AI to provide essential context for generative AI prompts — is essential for organizational success in 2024.

To take a closer look at what technology leaders around the world are saying, read more in “The state of AI 2024.”

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